Maxine Waters: Biden Win Is the ‘Dawn Of A New Progressive America’
California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters said on Thursday that the victory of Joe Biden — recently proclaimed by the media — will usher the “dawn of a new progressive America.”
Speaking during a committee hearing, Waters, who heads the House Financial Services, told appointees of President Donald Trump to various financial agencies including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the National Credit Union Administration and the Federal Reserve, that Biden’s election gave him the “mandate” to overturn the policies of the Trump administration.
She then suggested some of the potential policies of the incumbent Republican president that could be overturned under a Biden-Harris administration.
“On November 3, American decisively rejected President Trump, his harmful policies and his dangerous rhetoric. The American people have given President-elect Joe Biden a mandate to reverse the harmful policies of the Trump administration,” the California lawmaker and staunch critic of President Trump said.
“I’m putting our witnesses on notice that I will be working with the Biden administration to roll back these rules,” she added.
During the hearing, Waters slammed the “harmful” revisions to the anti-redlining rules under the OCC’s “Community Reinvestment Act” that was put in place to stop discrimination in lending usually based on prospective customer’s racial background or ethnicity.
“We are emerging from the dark days of the Trump administration into the dawn of a new progressive America, where pro-consumer and pro-investor policies will always be first on the agenda,” Waters added.
Republicans push back
Meanwhile, North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, a top ranking Republican, pushed back against the claims made by Rep. Waters that the Democrats’ win this year gave them a mandate to push progressive policies.
McHenry, who is the Republican leader of the House Financial Services Committee, said the losses that Democrats suffered in the House do not reflect the public’s endorsement of policies being put forward by the “woke left.”
“We have more Republicans in the next Congress in the House of Representatives because, quite frankly, the far left went so far,” McHenry said.
“While you may have had some successes in the election, I don’t think it’s a wide endorsement of a far-left policy agenda that the chair noted.”
Democrats are still expected to maintain control of the majority in the House of Representatives with 215 seats versus the 201 held by Republicans.
Nonetheless, the GOP flipped nine seats from Democrats while maintaining all the party seats up for re-election.
Republican also gathered 50 seats in the Senate, just one seat shy of maintaining its control of the chamber. Democrats, on the other hand, have 48 seats — putting in focus the two Georgia runoff elections on January 5.
